Last month we delivered our first benchmarks
of the Amazon EC2 Cloud, but those initial tests were limited to just a few
of their cloud computing instances due to failures with the Ubuntu EC2 operating
system on their other compute instances. Earlier this month we then showed how
the Amazon EC2 Micro was comparable
to a Nokia N900 and Intel Atom, but now we have a more exhaustive comparison
complete of all major Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud types. Using the Amazon Linux
AMI operating system, we have run a plethora of performance benchmarks on the
m1.small, m1.large, m1.xlarge, m2.xlarge, m2.2xlarge, m2.4xlarge, c1.medium, and
c1.xlarge cloud computing instances.

Amazon's own Linux operating system obviously had no issues (kernel
panics or anything else) with any of the EC2 instances, unlike Ubuntu 10.10 EC2.
The Amazon Linux AMI release 1 was using the Linux 2.6.34.7-56.40.amzn1 kernel,
GCC 4.1.2, and an EXT3 file-system. The 64-bit versions of Amazon Linux AMI were
used except for the two instance types (m1.small and c1.medium) that are 32-bit
only. Prices listed with each instance type are for Amazon's North Virginia (United
States) data center using Linux/UNIX. Here are Amazon’s specifications for
each of the systems in the Elastic Compute Cloud:

The m1.small, m1.large, and m1.xlarge are considered Amazon's
standard instances. There's also the high-memory instances used below that offer
proportionally more system memory and are designed for cloud computing with a
focus on databases and other memory-intensive workloads.

These are all of Amazon's EC2 instances besides the t1.micro (their
instance that's provided free to new customers, but its performance is only comparable
to a Nokia N900 smart-phone and often falls short of an Intel Atom netbook), and
then their cluster compute and cluster GPU instances.

On each of these Amazon EC2 instances we ran a set of 60 benchmarks
from Phoronix Test Suite 3.0
"Iveland" and those results are available in full on OpenBenchmarking.org. On OpenBenchmarking.org you can also compare your
cloud compute instances or real hardware platforms to that of these Amazon EC2
instances running Amazon Linux. However, as it is not feasible to put up all 60
benchmarks in this article, we included just 19 of the most interesting test results.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our NewEgg.com shopping links when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip.